production blog

techniques behind the prototype #3 “projection mapping”

Before we were able to continue our tedious workflow, we had to first build the lowres geometry. It’s constructed with simple grids, in a similar style as the layers we outputted before. These objects are formed and located as close as possible to the highres geometry.

(the projection mapping geometry of the toy ship.)

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every object got its own UV space, which were combined and packed into groups (shown via different wireframe colors in the image above) depending on their relative screensize (objects far away get less UV space).

(the UVs of the ship)

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one tool to bake them all….

Instead of creating all camera projections in Softimage with secondary UV spaces and a slow and user-unfriendly bake-tool, we decided to do it all in Nuke. (which was a massive timesaver, and one of the better ideas of this workflow ;) )

The lowres geometry and camera were imported via FBX without any problems, and were added to the test-layer-comp. (the big colored backplanes show the bake outputs)

(a monstrosity of a comp tree)

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We had to add dozens of new corrections and vector paints, because the way back (2 compositions) for a simple correction was way too time consuming. To make the layers work correctly inside of Unity, we eventually had to refine quite a lot. (but it’s still not perfect)

In our first attempt we baked everything in 4K, but we later learned that some GPUs/platforms don’t support it yet, so we regrouped everything and exported 2K maps just to be safe.

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this is how the baked texture of the ship looks like:

and this is result, the textured FBX model.

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Well, that’s basically the workflow before we move on to the characters, and later the realtime business of things.